Walking With A Ghost
by Sabriel41
Summary: Sometimes, history moves in imperfect circles; sometimes, it deals in first kisses and ghost stories and green icing. Sometimes, it replays its cards until you get it right. It takes them ten years, an errant bird, and two counts of not-quite-death.


**walking with a ghost**

**. o .**

"...Shiva's _tits, _I've got no luck."

"Yeah," he agrees, pushing off the tree he'd been leaning on, "this's pretty unlucky."

"No, idiot," she bristles, turning, trying to find her feet but her left leg hurts like a son of a zolom and she swallows the fact that she won't be walking in the near future. Her gun is still on the bird's holster (_stupid bird_) and while there are knives in her belt and her boots - a habit born of spending too much time with Auntie Yuffie, clearly, but she thanks the ninja silently - "literally. I think my leg's broken, my gods-damned bird has run off, and without a lure or a Luck, I can't call any others."

He tilts his head to the side and echoes his original statement. Except with a "that."

_She_ looks for a rock to beat her head against (it would at least knock her out), and, finding none, returns his gaze as evenly as she can. _Show no fear; don't you ever back down. Fight until you _can't,_ Marls, y`hear? _Her father's words flow back to her and she hides her wince with a snarl.

It is, apparently, harder to hide her blood. She tenses as his eyes narrow, adjusting to the light as they focus, unblinking, on her. She has never felt smaller. And did his nostrils just _flare?_ She wonders just how human he is, just how crazy she must be in this moment, because she could swear that the man who is looking at her so intently _is supposed to be dead._

"You're hurt." It isn't a question.

Before she can respond, he flickers over to the tree she has propped herself against and picks her up effortlessly. Pain sears through her leg and up her spine as her legs jostle against him, and she hopes, vindictively, that her scream deafens him. Even a little. She _will not_ pass out, though the thought has never been as tempting as it is now. "_What_-" she manages.

"Play along with me, will ya? It's raining and cold, and you're bleeding. A lot."

She tries to make her eyes roll - _oh, really_ - but isn't sure she succeeds, if his expression is anything to go by. _Okay then. But –_ "why?"

His eyes are eerie, fey, and guilelessly concerned, and she swears she knows them.

Knows him.

But if she's right, there is a larger problem than her leg at hand: everyone she knows with those eyes is dead. As the warmth from his arms seeps through her wet jacket, she can't deny that he feels alive. Looks it, too.

"I just told you," he replies, "it's cold, it's raining, and you're bleeding. There aren't many people around here, if you haven't noticed, and you could get really sick if you stay here."

_And you'd care why, stranger? _Marlene wonders, but grits out a "not - that - simple," and curses her weakness.

"Isn't it?" he replies, pale eyes puzzled as he looks down at her.

She could swear he is _serious_, and doesn't – _couldn't_, she tells herself – protest in time. There's no taunt in his eyes, no madness – and if only for those reasons he _can't_ be who she fears he is - and it steals her breath.

The forest becomes a green blur around them, and she tells herself it is because of the speed they are moving, not the lead weights that are settling over her eyelids. She thinks about asking him where they are going, about telling him to put her down, but it really _is_ raining and he strikes her as the type to take things too plainly, which might lead him to drop her quite literally if she asked him to. Self-preservation keeps her speechless as they continue; that, and gritting her teeth to keep from screaming.

He draws a worried breath as he watches her teeth grind together - he _knows_ the girl in his arms, though it has been many years since he has last seen her. She was smaller then. She'd still been a child, although in a different way than he had been; old soul in a young body when he was the reverse. She'd probably been lighter, but he had never carried her, then. _She'd_ been the one to offer her embrace as she had clung to his leg, stranger and enemy though he was, in that eerie city of vengeful ghosts. He'd never forgotten that.

She watches him watch her through half-lidded eyes, and suddenly knows that even if he answers her questions, it doesn't matter. Even if he does try to kill her whenever they get wherever he is headed - _and what kind of idiot is he, walking this far from home in the rain?_ - it will be less boring a death than exsanguination with a side of hypothermia.

Her last thought before unconsciousness claims her is that even if she's right, a grudge match ten years in the making sounds fifty times better. That, and she _definitely _was spending too much time with Auntie Yuffie.

By the time that he arrives at what he proudly calls 'home,' she is awake again. After entering, he drops her on a couch inside – she rewards him with a piercing howl of pain – and finds herself looking at his feet.

He administers what little aid he can, rooting through cabinets he tells her he hasn't looked in for years for a spare Hi-Potion or two, and coming up with a couple of bottles. As he tosses them to her, she thinks of how she has read, or maybe Yuffie had told her, or maybe it was part of a folk-story from lifetimes ago whispered in Elmyra's rich alto, that ghosts – real ghosts – don't have feet. _He_ does, she notes, before the potions take effect and she sleeps.

**. o .**

It is morning when she wakes. She wishes that she hadn't.

Yesterday has happened after all, says the pain in her leg – which is bandaged, wonder of wonders – says the absence of her bird and her traveling bag, says the fact that she is gracelessly sprawled across a sofa instead of the less forgiving earth she'd been growing accustomed to over the past month.

At the sound of soft beeps and clicks, she drags her eyes from her foot to see her rescuer-captor bent over a handheld video console. She can't see much of him; the cold air in the small house has led him to wrap up in a hooded sweater, and his attention is firmly on the game. "What are you, eight?" she rasps, amused.

He doesn't even look up. "Thirteen, I think."

She tilts her head scornfully at his broad shoulders even as she enjoys the deep lilt of his voice. She knows thirteen – has survived it – and thirteen he is_ not_. "Right."

"_Fine_," he pouts. "Don't believe me." After a moment of silence, he shrugs and restarts his game. "Hey, girl, how's your leg?"

"Like a giant Mog landed on it." She sighs. "Thanks for wrapping it up, by the way, but wouldn't it have been better to take me to a medic or something?"

He turns the game off with a laugh and sets it aside. "Because I'm going to walk for a day. In the rain. Carrying you. You're heavy, girl."

"Am not," she protests.

"Are too. I should know." His smile grows.

"Am not," she insists. "Geez. I stand by my prior statement."

"You're awfully lost for a law student."

She laughs at this, trying to prop herself up on her arms. "I'm not; not even a student, really. I'm just a traveler." She carefully extends her hand towards him. "Marlene Wallace."

He takes her hand and squeezes it – palms warm but fingers cold; she guesses he's been playing for a while. "Lawrence," he says, and she lets out a breath that she hadn't known she'd been holding. _See, silly? Nothing to worry about. _ But he continues. "Morigan in the village figures that that's what `Loz` is short for, anyway."

"Wh-_what_?" She shivers_. So. It's true. But_ -

"Hey, it's a weird name, but you don't have to go all pale," he says, trying to keep her calm. Ten years has given him enough distance to lose his interest in revenge. At least from her quarter. Leaning towards her, as if to tell a secret, he tests her. "I – we've never met. But I_ know_ you."

His eyes are intent, and inches from hers. He seems benign, even _hopeful_, but she suddenly remembers splintering wood and scattered lilies and a vicious smile. She knows that if she lies, her words will hurt her. So she breathes and answers. "It was a long time ago. I – I was a lot younger, then." Marlene manages a smile. "You look almost the same."

"Do I?" Loz asks, his smile strange. "I can't remember. Not really."

She catches her words, an "…oh…" slipping out breathlessly. _Oh._ "Really?"

"Really," he confirms gruffly, suddenly uncomfortable with the emotions he sees in her expression. "Get some sleep, girl. It's still early, and you look like you could use it."

Marlene scowls, but he has already turned back to his game, and misses her look of disgust.

**. o .**

One day, after he annoys her, she swats at his feet from her perch on the couch. "Just checking," she says, as he eyes her warily.

"Checking what -?" But someone must have told him the ghost-story too, because he reads the direction of her gaze towards his feet (_which_, he thinks, _are as solid as any other part of me, thank-you-very-much_) and laughs. "If I'm a ghost? If I am, I'm one with something to live for," he says, sprawling beside her. "Lucky you."

"Hmph." She snorts, but she doesn't deny it. Her father didn't raise any idiots, and Tifa would find her and kill her if she wasn't at least mildly gracious. (And then Tifa would probably kill _him_ too, just for being there, and that much blood would ruin a perfectly good sofa.) So she settles for slinging her feet over his knees, smiling sweetly at his noise of protest. "Ah, ah. We agreed. Your bed, my couch."

That agreement had taken three days to reach. It had taken two hours to convince her that he wasn't about to give up his bed – in the days Before, he'd told her, they'd never had time, and Brother – Kadaj is always brother-with-a-capital-B, but he calls Yazoo by name, and she stores that thought away – always thought things like beds were a luxury. A waste.

She had held her breath – here, for the first time, was history she_ remembers_ – but he catches her at it and his eyes had shifted.

"Besides," he added, mischief twisting his lips into an entirely different pout, "sure, we had the higher pain tolerance and stuff, but that didn't mean we couldn't enjoy the good stuff. Can't. _Damn_ it. So, yeah. Injury or no injury, you'd have to kill me all over again to get the bed, short stuff."

"I could still take you," she said, bristling at the name.

"And yet somehow I remember that Rude couldn't," he replied, stealing her blanket as she spluttered.

"Sensei's _old_."

"Sensei, huh? _There's_ a twist." He looked up, surprised, with a new respect for the girl beside him.

"People change," she had answered, breaking his gaze and turning back to her book.

. o .

Four days later, she makes it halfway to the door, using a walking stick as a crutch. When he appears in the doorway, coming in from outside, she tenses. "Let me go," she says, her eyes determined. "Let me pass."

"And where would you go?" he asks, eyeing the way her weight-bearing leg has already started to tremble. "Where? The nearest town's a day's walk, and that's if you're moving fast."

She raises her chin. "I don't understand you - you don't want a ransom, you don't want _anything,_ but you won't let me leave."

He leans against the doorframe and smiles down at her. "You," he grins, "are the single most interesting thing to happen to me in a long time, girl."

_She_ goes bright red at his words and swings her free hand in a hooking punch, which he leans back to avoid. Unused to the movement while on makeshift supports, she sways forward and nearly loses her balance. By the time she recovers and faces him again, every angle of her limbs screaming for him to _just say something more_ so she can pound him into the ground, his smile has disappeared.

"The other reason," he continues, "which you might find more to your liking, is that you'd never make it through that forest the way you are. _Especially_ not with that leg the way it is and just those tiny knives of yours."

"You could take me. Help me." Her eyes are still defiant – it's more order than request, and he bristles.

"I could." He pads around her, kicking off his boots and sprawling on the couch. "But I'd get nothing out of it. Plus, you'd probably beeline right back here with an angry mob in tow to kill me for my kindness – sure's Hades that father of yours would think of that."

_So, he's right_, she thinks, but she isn't about to give in. Turning to face him, she pitches her voice higher. "But – but – I eat your food! And steal your couch – okay, only some of the time, but you know what I mean –"

"-plus, you're really freakin` loud," he adds, mimicking her.

"That, too! So?" She waits, only to breathe out on a sigh as he stretches his hands over his head and folds his fingers together. As he settles further into the couch, she realizes that he's definitely not going anywhere anytime soon. _And neither am I,_ she thinks, her leg tingling in pain.

He waits for her to hobble back from the door, and only winces a little when she swings her feet over his legs as she collapses beside him. "So silence gets boring," he replies.

After a month of traveling, almost always in her own company, she can't deny he's right. "So tell me a story," she says, and he laughs.

"I should be asking you," he explains. "You're the world traveler. I'm the one who got his memory wiped."

She frowns, concerned at his revelation. But she can't help her worry – he looks thoughtful and mopey, the way that Cloud always used to before he'd disappear for weeks. And while being stuck here with Loz is interrupting her travels, and she shouldn't (really shouldn't) like the warmth of his legs against hers, or the way his lips are quirked even now into a smile, she's learned enough from the woman that raised her to admit that she does. And she's too much like that woman to just let him be.

_So –_ "I asked you first," and she pokes at his side, invading his space with a brave smile.

But he is not quite Cloud, either, for which she's glad; if he _was_, this would be too much like another story, one of the few that the flower girl had told her. It had been about a family in a land far away that made hers look normal; a son that is banished only to slay his father and marry his mother – Aeris had just been getting to that part when Elmyra had walked by; after hearing it, the older woman had immediately relieved her daughter of any storytelling duties – because Loz draws away with a laugh. "So you did."

_Well_, Marlene thought to herself. _That was easy._ When Cloud drew into his black moods, it didn't matter who tried to pull him out of it, there he would stay. She'd tried, and Tifa had broken her hands (and her heart) trying. Pops would give it a try or two if he was around and quickly give up, his frustration painting the room an invisible blue. Auntie Yuffie would pester Cloud, too – and she, of anyone, would win the blond over occasionally. Marlene still remembered the first time Yuffie had succeeded. She had tugged on Yuffie's hand as soon as she could reach her, pleading with the Wutaian woman to teach her how to do the same. She would never forget Yuffie's wicked grin and quick agreement – or the look of horror on Cloud's handsome face as Yuffie announced to the Seventh Heaven at large that she was taking on an apprentice. That day, Miss Yuffie became Auntie Yuffie, and Marlene suspected she'd made a lifelong friend…

This time, _he_ pokes at her leg to bring her back down to earth. "You even listenin`, short stuff?"

Marlene sighs at the nickname – at this rate, it'll stick – but nods. "You bet. Get on with that story of yours, and make it good."

Loz smirks at her words, but he does.

And she's more tired than she thought, because her eyes quickly grow heavy. By the time he's finished his recollection (it is a fuzzy memory of his life Before, which she's sure he's embellished to make his own role sound better, but she doesn't call him on it because she _did_ ask…) she is asleep.

He laughs quietly as he takes in the girl beside him. "Thanks for listening, short stuff," he murmurs, and is surprised by how much he means it. Shaking his head, he drops a blanket over her and finds his bed.

In the morning, he is not-quite-surprised to remember that his dreams were not of steel towers and colder eyes – of brothers he has not given up on but stopped looking for long ago – or the free-floating miasma and soft voices that he guesses is a remnant from his time in the Lifestream. He remembers remembering her as he faded and woke up a million miles away from the splintered steel city with few memories but the ghost of her grin. _Could she have been why - ?_

He can think of worse reasons to have lived. Several, in fact. But most of all, he dreamt of the sea and her laughter, and can't stop his smile, even as the flesh on his arm shimmers and fades; where it has, his skin – his self – is a little less tangible. Less visible. Less _there. _

_So that's how it is,_ he thinks, and wonders how long it will be before she knows.

Before she knows everything.

As the unmistakable scent of burnt toast wafts through his open door, Loz grimaces. He hopes to Hades that she learns how to cook first.

**. o .**

He shimmers. Just a little, some mornings, but more and more as their walks get longer. By the time she makes it to the cape and back, only collapsing as they round the small cove in front of the house, he's almost always effused with a subtle glow. She'd always thought that such a thing would emasculate anybody. If anything, the glow should dehumanize him, more than the prematurely silver hair and eyes that no longer seem so eerie already do. It doesn't. It makes him magnetic, and she finds that her eyes follow him as he moves around the small house. _And,_ she scowls, after he catches her eye one evening with a curious look, _he knows it. Dork._

"What are you thinking?" he asks. "You've got that look about you again."

"Again?" Marlene asks, willing herself not to blush. Not that there _is_ a reason to blush. "Um. Nothing much. You?"

"I'm flattered," he grins, taking her reply exactly how she hoped he wouldn't.

She decides to distract him. "Stupid, that wasn't what I meant."

"You're a bad liar, Marlene," he said, still grinning. "If you're not going to tell me what it is, tell me something else. Something interesting. Like why, in the time since I found you in the rain, you haven't ever really mentioned that massive, crazy extended family that maybe tried to kill me a few times. Or why you're a million miles from them, and from the look of your coat, have been for a while."

"I didn't think you'd be interested," she answers.

"Well," he says, his eyes glinting mischievously as he cracks his knuckles lazily, "I don't much _care,_ but I do find it interesting that they haven't come to rain hellfire – or, hey, is it heavenfire, as they're heroes and all? – on my head yet. You've been keeping your silence and your distance, short stuff. And _that_ is weird."

"Would you believe," she tells him, sipping from her water glass, "that it was all Yuffie's idea?"

He frowns. "I, uh –"

"The ninja?" she reminds him. "Short? Acrobatic? Wore tiny shorts and awesome boots?"

Loz laughs. "She sounds fun, but I've got nothin'. Sorry, girl, but - okay. You're saying it was her idea for you to travel around the Continent, alone? And the rest of that gang _bought it?_"

"Something along those lines," Marlene says, "though Pops didn't go along with the idea so easily. He wanted Denzel to come along with me, at least, but… well, Denzel's not much of a traveler."

"Was he your brother or something? His name – his name sounds familiar. Den-zel," he says, testing the name out, and brightening as a memory slips back. "He – he was that kid with the sandy hair; the one that Older Brother trashed his bike to save, back then. Him, right?"

Marlene nods her head immediately, but she waits to reply, watching as he moves towards the stove to poke at the chunk of what he had caught earlier that day and which she is just going to call _meat. _It is, apparently and despite its greenish colour, destined to be their dinner. Deciding that she'll make him taste-test it first, she answers. "That's Denzel. And, no. I mean, I guess he is, in a way, but not really." Her smile grows, hidden behind the fall of her hair, which she is plaiting to keep from fidgeting as his eyes seek hers. "I kissed him once, after all."

"You kissed your… brother?"

His expression makes her wish for the camera in her bag, which is Shiva-knows-where by now. "No! No," she laughs, "he's a friend, nothing more. Besides. The fortune teller told me that it was a good idea."

Loz nearly stabs his hand with the carving fork. "So, let me get this straight," he splutters. Guffaws, really – it's not a pretty sound and it's not really a nice one, either, but she knows from his smile that he's genuinely amused – "you're serious. You kissed that Denzel brat because a tarot-reading crackpot told you that it was the thing to do, _and_ that he wasn't the one meant for you? And you tell me that _I'm_ crazy, girl."

"You are," she says, not missing a beat as she limps to the kitchen and casts a worried look at the roast. "But I suppose we were, too. I was fourteen – I'd just turned fourteen – and was the right sort of crazy to believe it was worth worrying about first kisses and my general lack of them so far." Seeing _his_ look, she punches his bicep. "Don't – don't you look at me like that! A lot of girls think that sort of thing; it's totally normal. Besides. We can't all be leveling cities in our teenage years."

"That was a long time ago," he says, firmly.

"It was," she agrees, feeling the tension in his arm under her knuckles, which have lingered. "I don't think I'd have ever imagined _this,_ then."

**. o .**

"_Everybody_ has a birthday," she insists, leaning on tip-toe to peek over his shoulder after she notices him looking at the ancient wall calendar with an unusually glum expression, "and if you don't, we'll just have to give you one."

"Bossy," he replies, but his eyes are smiling as he gives in.

. o .

So there is a Day, complete with cake, and somehow she even manages to make icing.

"Isn't there a saying," he says, after he's blown out the candle and the cake has been thoroughly devoured between the two of them, "that goes something like `sweet sixteen and never been -`" and to his (not-quite) surprise, she kisses him. Not only that, Loz finds, she has launched herself towards him.

She leans into him and twists her arms around him like a vine because it's ludicrous that he knows those words much less is saying them and - "you're not sixteen, you dork," she says between kisses and laughs as he laughs and gasps in surprise as he nips at her lower lip playfully – and before she starts hyperventilating or straight out _melting_ she spares the energy to think that it's not such a big deal, really. It's just a kiss and it's not like it's her first. Besides, she's starting to suspect he's staying alive for her sake and she won't even bother to deny the fact that he saved her life - and for an utter beginner at kissing, he's really not so bad…

Pulling away, he toys with the braid that has grown long enough to fall over her shoulder and grins. "So that's what the big deal is all about? Huh_._"

"Huh?" she echoes ineloquently, realizing that she has all but climbed into his lap.

He catches sight of her blush and his brow furrows as he lets his hand slip from her hair to her forehead, his fingertips pressing gently against it.

She is confused until she realizes he is _checking her temperature_, of all things, and she wants to laugh until she sees that he is actually worried - worried! - about her. Instead, she smiles; warm and feminine, _and_, she worries, _loved_ - and kisses him again.

His worry fades immediately, and he returns her embrace, remembering her kindness from all those years ago. He remembers wanting to make sure she was all right, that she was happy, that strange girl with her scuffed shoes and soft smile. Her smile isn't any kind of soft now, he thinks, and wonders when she became the hunter between the two of them.

"Thank you," he says, because he can't think of anything else that he can say, and the words taste foreign on his tongue – foreign and sweet and he _knows,_ now, and he can't take back knowing any more than he can her weight against his chest or the smear of lurid green icing soaking into his shirt. So he repeats "thank you, thank you, _thank you_..." and tries to remember how to breathe as she batters her fists against his chest with no real power and bursts into noisy tears and laughter and it looks, he thinks, like it hurts to be doing all that at once, so he reaches around her shoulders and pats her back awkwardly, which only makes her (laugh? cry? both?) louder.

They cannot stay like this, and they know it, but in this moment, they are perfect.

. o .

Even so, it is with a kind of perfection that winter plays out its days, and despite the wicked coastal winds, they persist in their walks around the coastline. She tries not to notice that as she heals further and no longer needs his arm to support her, he seems to fade, until one morning she wakes up to find him leaning against her couch, more shadow than housemate in the early morning light.

"And here," she says, rubbing her eyes and trying to keep her voice even, "you said you were a ghost with something to live for."

"It's stupid, but I think I was," he replies, looking down at her. "Planet knows it's a crazy enough theory to be true. _Was_, being the operative word though, short stuff. Looks like I don't get to be all shimmery and shit for much longer."

"Do you want a tree?" Marlene blurts, and ducks her head into the cushions at his withering, confused stare.

"A _tree?_" he says, puzzled.

"You know, a tree. Some people – you know, in memory of someone, plant them. And they're pretty."

"Cause _I'm_ pretty," he retorts. "Save your arms, short stuff – with your track record you'd end up cutting off your arm with a spade and I'd have to stick around – _hey!_" He dodges the pillow effortlessly and throws it back at her. "Just try and tell me it couldn't happen."

Marlene refuses to reply, and pouts until he speaks again.

Looking up at the ceiling, and then over to her, his grin grows. "Marlene?"

"Mmhmm?"

"You're really all right, you know? But hey, since you asked so nice, I _could_ do with a kiss..."

"You, too," she says, and she obliges, even as she sees her pack in his hands.

There are, she thinks in the minutes afterwards, as he tells her he's packed her things, really only three kisses in any relationship: the one at the beginning, the one at the _I love you,_ and the one at the end.

His words and her departure from the little house are abrupt, but she understands. She'd never really expected to stay in the first place, and she doesn't manage to hide her smile when Loz tells her that if his death has to be "sparkly and weak-ass and undignified" he'd prefer at least it was unwitnessed. She can't say she even blames him. And though they'd never made it around to the second kind of kiss (_it wasn't that kind of - oh, whatever it was_; _not really, not quite -)_ tears pool in her eyes but she closes the door behind her and breathes.

And she thinks, as she shrugs her jacket up around her shoulders, carrying the few things she's learned to call hers in her time in this house by the sea and a few surprises that she will discover along the way back to Edge, that maybe a few months from now they would have been celebrating her birthday. This makes her think of his birthday (unbirthday) and that pitiful, wonderful, lopsided cake, and that first kiss.

As she doesn't say goodbye (he made her promise she wouldn't), she thinks of birthdays and deathdays and that it's all just a vicious cycle – but that, then again, she's being silly and it _isn't - _ because even now she is not alone. As she moves past the door, across the small cove and onto the plain, the wind whips around her back and whispers around her calves and curves and shoulders, and she smiles.

The wind is warm, and it smells of spring, and the sea - and she swears she can hear his laughter somewhere in it. Pausing to look back across the coastline at a place that she never expected to become a home, she laughs. "You dork," she tells the wind with a watery smile.

And although no-one but the sea birds call back in reply, Marlene Wallace breathes in, stretches her legs, and starts walking again.

**. o .**

She walks, and she keeps walking until her feet find her back in the place that she had left almost a year earlier. Her hair is longer and her words are fewer, but she still has a sunny smile for her family and can beat Denzel (much to his chagrin) at any game they put their hands to. Tifa teaches her, in the quiet moments, how to block punches and spin shot glasses, and she also learns from the martial artist to avoid lying outright about her year Away – because Pops is smart, for all his bluster, and Tifa is perceptive.

This Marlene is not the same girl that left Edge on the recommendation of a ninja princess, but almost everyone attributes that to her travels or to a girlishness better left unconsidered. When the pilot stops by and comments lazily that it's nothing to worry about, that she might just be harbouring one more ghost behind her eyes, she freezes.

Captain Highwind will never know how right he is, though he half-laughs as he sees that the dishrag has gone still under her hand. "Heh," he says, "even if it's true, kid, it don't matter. You're still breathing, right? Keep at it, and you'll be okay. Wish I'd learned that earlier." With a smile and a tip of his weathered cap, the Captain lights a cigarette and heads for the door of the bar to wait for his friends.

As he goes, Marlene smiles a smile he will never see. She will never tell him that she already knows.

. o .

**...finis.**

. o .

**sabe's scribbles**: a debt of gratitude is owed to: tv on the radio's "modern romance," and to tegan & sara's "walking with a ghost." To ghost stories. This probably wouldn't have showed up without Iron & Wine's "Shepherd's Dog" album. To Tijuana Pirate for making that comment all those years ago about hopeful loveliness being in all of my pieces. This was to be the piece without said hopeful loveliness (but I think I failed; fortunately, I still like this!) To M, for distracting me until it was ready to be written. To the fortune teller, who actually told me to kiss someone even if we weren't meant to be together (like I could make that up? ^_~) To lallie and tiny q for reminding me that you still have to _work_ through writer's block. That all said, I hope you enjoyed the read!

**disclaimer:** ...no-one who actually owned these characters would leave them alone for as long as I do! (Case in point: the Complication.) That said, Loz and Marlene (and the house by the sea) and the other folks mentioned herein belong to the company presently known as Square.


End file.
